City Building Surveyors's Detail Sheets, ca 1956

On 1 January 1949 the boundaries of the City of Sydney expanded to take in the neighbouring municipal councils of Glebe, Darlington, Newtown, Erskineville, Alexandria, Waterloo, Redfern and Paddington. This expansion took place in accordance with provisions in the Local Government (Areas) Act 1948. The effect was to give the City responsibility for a ring of adjacent suburbs containing mostly dilapidated residential and industrial areas.

To effectively manage the enlarged area, and also to come to grips with new town planning responsibilities given to local government after 1945, the City of Sydney embarked on a project to make a detailed map of the whole area within the new boundaries. The City commissioned an aerial photogrammetric survey, which was flown on 15 December 1949 at 4800 feet by Adastra Photography.

Using the aerial photographs as a basis, the staff of the City Building Surveyor’s department prepared a set of 27 detail sheets, plus a master sheet. Retired staff who worked on the project tell us that the work was completed by about 1955.

The plans were widely copied for use throughout the Council over the following years. The original set appears to have been produced in large sheets (approx modern AO size) at a scale of 2 chains to the inch, but smaller sets at 5 chains to the inch were also used. Several of these smaller scale sets survive in the City of Sydney Archives, but only one incomplete full scale set, and it does not seem to be a first-generation copy. Some of the smaller sets have been used for various town planning purposes and are overlaid with zoning and road improvement scheme information.

The detail sheets were regarded as a working document rather than a definitive plan of the City at a moment in time. As details on the ground changed, the corresponding detail sheet was redrawn to reflect this. Changes of land use, road realignments and new features were filled in, and previous details erased from the map. This process continued until the early 1970s, except that for areas removed from City control in 1968 (Paddington, Glebe and part of Newtown) the updating stopped at that point.

The result of this process is that the detail sheets, completed during the years 1949-1955, in fact show the City as it was by about 1968-1972. As far as we know, only last-generation copies have survived. The 1949 aerial survey photographs have survived and these will be added at a later date.